Let's call her Arabella
She was next-level posh. I was told that her nickname was Her Majesty, which she rather liked.
Not Balenciaga posh, but just-got-out-of-bed, tangled-hair, Le Chameau boot chic posh that the upper classes can somehow rock. I try the same thing and look like I’ve been cut out of a vehicle.
Anyway, I liked her on sight and was much less certain of how she felt about us.
We hadn’t even made it properly into the room before she wanted to know how long the session would be, whether it would go across lunch, if there was any kind of assessment and finally, “Darling, would it be a terrible inconvenience if I were to leave early?”
It was a four-hour Menopause at Work workshop with her and her colleagues. We were coffeed up and ready to roll. I normally allow a couple of minutes for people to settle in, no ice-breakers, no one likes those, but Arabella had given me a strong urge to get on with things.
Quite right too.
So I skipped straight to the first exercise, and Arabella was my first volunteer.
I say volunteer…
Years ago, before one of the first sessions I ran, I also had a local Facebook group with about 10,000 people in it. I asked them what they genuinely detested about training, workshops and networking events. I’ve based a lot of my workshop design on whatever sits opposite those answers on the colour wheel.
They did not struggle for material.
PowerPoint featured heavily, particularly text-heavy ones where you could feel the room collectively shouting “could this not have been an email?” in their heads.
Sitting in uncomfortable chairs. Sitting for too long in general. Boring speakers. Boring voices. Facilitators telling you their life story for no real reason.
Being put on the spot. Being left on the spot. The office ‘joker’ dominating the room as the agenda timing disappears depressingly over the 5pm horizon.
Forced jollity came up a lot.
I am a dance fanatic, but ask me at 52 years old to introduce myself to strangers with 'a little dance move' and that would be a no, thank you. Genuine recent experience. Cringed all the way to the pretend loo visit.
Ice-breakers took a pretty comprehensive kicking too, along with patronising trainers.
Cold rooms and bad coffee also featured.
Beyond the obvious bugbears was something deeper and universal: a hatred of not seeing the real-life value of the time people were giving up in the first place.
People report being stretched more thinly than I can ever remember, in terms of what they have to achieve and the time they have to do it. Time feels more precious than ever.
The sound of important deadlines whooshing by while you’re listening to someone drone on about something that feels as relevant as simultaneous equations did in Year 10.
When will I ever use this in real life?
Which, in fairness, was pretty much Arabella’s point before we had even taken our coats off, and I completely respect it.
Four hours is a lot of someone’s working day to ask for. She didn’t owe us her attention just because we'd booked the conference room, and she certainly didn’t owe us enthusiasm.
So we spent that morning, as we do with all workshops, bringing the company’s relevant issues to life in a way that was useful, engaging, mostly painless and easy to use later without having to rummage around in your memory.
Result.
Arabella stayed.
Then she stayed behind afterwards.
She told me she had planned to give us ten minutes out of politeness, and then leave. Instead, she said she had learned more about advocating for her team in that session than she had in years on the job.
That was particularly interesting. We definitely hadn’t spent four hours telling her how to do that, but she got to approach and practice aspects of it in different ways.
And this, for me, is where “we’ve done the training” can become a slightly misleading measure of success.
Training might be comprehensive and the policy might cover everything it needs to. Both have a legitimate place.
But knowing something exists, understanding the implications and being able to use it when another human being is sitting in front of you, having a really bad day, are three different things.
A manager can know there is a menopause policy somewhere on the intranet and still have absolutely no idea what to do when someone says, “I’m struggling.”
They may know all about symptoms and remember that adjustments are possible. They may even have got 91/100 on the online training. But then a real human has an issue, in real life, in the real office.
There is no multiple-choice answer. You can’t freeze the conversation to look up best practice. What is useful is enough understanding to know what to ask, what not to ask, what not to assume, what needs to go elsewhere and what happens next, based on principles you actually understand.
Like when you’ve passed your driving test, but have to drive on the motorway, on ice, in fog, with a slow puncture and your passenger is busting for a wee. You don’t pull over and get out the Highway Code. You have to know what you’re supposed to do and why, there and then.
That is the bit I think can get lost when training or policy becomes a kind of finish line.
So what are we talking about, here?
- Someone says mornings have become difficult because they are barely sleeping.
- An experienced employee suddenly starts missing deadlines or making mistakes they never used to make.
- Someone asks for more flexibility but does not want to discuss their symptoms in detail.
- A colleague makes a clumsy joke about a hot flush in front of everyone.
- A manager suspects menopause may be relevant but has no idea whether they should raise it.
- Someone says, “I’m thinking of leaving,” and nobody knows whether to ask what is really driving that.
- Two people need different adjustments and the manager is worried about being “fair”.
- An employee discloses something personal and the manager does not know what they can agree themselves, what needs HR and what should stay confidential.
The bladder-bursting, motorway-in-fog moments.
People genuinely want to get their responses right.
We work with organisations to practice bridging the gap between knowing and doing, through Human Upgrade Menopause at Work.
And by practice, I don’t mean the kind of role-play where two unwilling volunteers perform an excruciating conversation everyone else suddenly gets fascinated by their own shoes.
I mean giving people a low-stakes chance to work out what they might do before it matters. To hear how someone else would handle it, try different approaches, ask the awkward questions in a room where nobody’s livelihood or mental health depends on the answer, and get more comfortable navigating grey areas.
Then when someone eventually sits in front of you with an actual problem, “I think there was something about this on slide 37” won't even make your radar.